


like i've been there before

by Nokomis



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: (quentin has confusing feelings about this), Canon Compliant, Eliot as The Monster, Friendship, M/M, Post-4x08, Quentin and Julia finally talk, Quentin remembers his family, Sharing a Bed, the monster wants a snuggle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-18
Updated: 2019-03-18
Packaged: 2019-11-23 09:47:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18150266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nokomis/pseuds/Nokomis
Summary: Post 4x08.  The Monster is the big spoon; Quentin and Julia have tea.





	like i've been there before

**Author's Note:**

> I have spent the past few weeks binging and falling in love with this show, fic was inevitable. Thanks to Luna for looking over this for me!

It was hard to sleep, the night after the egg-hangover faded. 

Not that it was ever easy, but at least tonight he wasn’t having to rub eggs on his face, and his head didn’t actively feel like it was trying to burst open (again, like an egg? Quentin was never eating an omelette again) so he couldn’t blame his lack of sleep on anything concrete. Instead, it was the phantom memory of his son in his arms, that soft heavy weight that had made his arms go numb but he’d always been reluctant to set down. 

He hadn’t wanted, precisely, to share a child with Poppy. More than anything what he wanted was his own son back, but that was impossible -- time had played its tricks in multiple ways, taking his son first through adulthood and then through an impossible time loop. 

He both hated that the memories had returned to him, hated the pain that came with them, and was grateful beyond all measure that the memory of his son wasn’t lost to him.

And thinking about his son made him think about the other thing he desperately tried to avoid - the rest of his family. Arielle with her soft smiles and sharp humor, shining bright for the few precious years they shared, and the steadfast presence of Eliot -- always _there_ , whether they were laughing or fighting or fucking or working on that damned mosaic.

He missed Eliot with a sharpness that had only intensified since finding out that Eliot was alive.That Eliot had managed to break through and speak to him, overpowering a monster that the gods themselves feared, and now it was up to him to bring Eliot back somehow. 

Quentin sighed and rolled over, tucking his arm over his head and trying to block out all thoughts. He’d never sleep if he thought of Eliot.

He was nearly there -- nearly to the sweet escape of sleep -- when something settled on the bed behind him, jolting him back into wakefulness. Before he could turn to see who it was, an arm settled over his waist, a familiar body settling against his own. He’d slept thousands of nights like this, knew exactly whose body nestled against his own so easily.

“Um?” he said aloud, unsure of what mood the Monster was in. He felt frozen, unwilling to look over his shoulder in case that was the last thing the Monster wanted.

“Shhh,” said the Monster, lifting the hand draped over Quentin’s hip long enough to press its index finger against Quentin’s lips. “This body craves sleep.”

“Sleep, okay, good,” Quentin said. “Sleep only. Busy day tomorrow. Finding body parts. Killing gods. Need to… rest up. For that.”

“Mmm-hmm,” the Monster said, with Eliot’s voice all raspy and sleepy like Quentin always had loved, before. Its breath was warm against the back of Quentin’s neck, and Quentin wasn’t entirely sure that the shivers it sent across his skin were entirely from fear.

The Monster draped its arm back across Quentin’s waist, its hand resting against the mattress, thankfully not straying downwards like Eliot’s had so often done. Quentin wasn’t entirely sure what he would do if the Monster discovered that particular set of human urges. 

Quentin stayed as still as possible. It reminded him oddly of Julia’s eleventh birthday party, playing light as a feather stiff as a board, only this time he was desperately wishing the otherworldly away. 

The Monster sighed and shifted, and the stiffness of his arm across Quentin’s waist softened perceptibly. His breathing evened into the slow steadiness of sleep, and Quentin still lay there, wide awake, caught between a dream and a nightmare. 

He was hyper-aware of every sound and motion he made, and tried his best to remain as much a statue as possible, ignoring every itch and ache until he found himself on the cusp of sleep, the world and its horrors fading into a soft muted problem for another day. 

It shouldn’t have beencomforting to be wrapped in the Monster’s embrace, but with the memory of their time as a family fresh on his mind, he found himself drifting off more easily than he had since the Monster had taken him. 

*

Quentin woke slowly, the sun warm on his face and the familiar pressure of Eliot’s body pressed against his own. He heard his name again, spoken quietly in a woman’s voice, clearly pitched to not wake Eliot, and for a long, blissful moment he was in Fillory of the past, between Eliot and Arielle, the only thing missing the insistent cry of their son. 

Then he blinked himself awake, and it was Julia crouched beside his bed, brow furrowed, while the Monster slept peacefully beside him. 

Julia gestured for him to follow her, and he did, slowly extricating himself from the tangle of the Monster’s borrowed limbs with the ease of half a century’s practice. 

Julia didn’t speak until they were in the kitchen, the bedroom door safely shut behind them. “Tell me you didn’t.”

Quentin blinked, realizing as he woke more fully how it must have looked to Julia, seeing him sleeping tangled up with the Monster. “No, I didn’t-- Julia! I wouldn’t do that to Eliot.”

Julia sighed and dropped heavily onto one of the stools. “That’s what I thought, but sometimes you just kind of go along with things, so I had to make sure.”

Quentin busied himself by making tea and said, “It crawled into bed with me last night, talking about craving sleep, then it spooned me. End of story.”

“And you didn’t think it was, you know, an odd move for it to make?” Julia was wearing a smirk he knew well. This was Julia’s about-to-get-dirt-on-Quentin face. 

Quentin narrowed his eyes at her. “I’m guessing you already know.”

“That you’re stupidly in love with Eliot? I mean, it was kind of hard to miss, these past few days.” Julia accepted her mug from Quentin and poured an obscene amount of honey into it.

Quentin took the honey from her before she could use it all, and sighed. “I think the Monster didn’t quite understand why it was there, either, to be honest. I think that when Eliot broke free that one time, that his…” Quentin waved a hand around carelessly, unsure of the exact word he wanted to use.

“His personality started to leak through,” Julia said thoughtfully. “Like with all the drinking and drugs.”

“It doesn’t understand emotions,” Quentin said. “So it’s… muddling through.”

Julia lifted her mug up in a toast. “Aren’t we all?”

Quentin tapped his mug against hers, then waited for it. Julia wasn’t going to let this drop. 

She lasted ten full seconds before bursting out with, “Okay but _when_ the hell did you and Eliot happen? Because if the Monster is crawling into bed with you, this clearly isn’t one of those epic crushes of yours, like with your dungeon master in high school.”

“He totally liked me back, Jules, he always gave me the best quests,” Quentin shot back reflexively. Then he sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “The quest for the time key. We lived an entire life in Fillory together. But we weren’t together, after.”

“I thought you didn’t remember that. Didn’t you die?” Julia was looking at him intently, like she knew how important these words were for him.

“Eventually,” Quentin said, shrugging, trying to not picture Eliot’s face as he covered it with their favorite quilt. He stared down at his tea. “After fifty years. We worked on that damn puzzle for fifty years. We had a family together, me and Eliot; we raised a son and had grandchildren and we were happy together.”

There were a thousand other words he wanted to say, to tell Julia about everything, from Arielle to the way Ted’s tiny hand had clasped around his finger to the expression on Eliot’s face the first time one of Ted’s diapers had leaked through onto his vest. Eventually, he could -- assuming they weren’t all slaughtered by the Monster -- but right now… Right now, that was all that mattered. That Julia knew that he’d been _happy_ and that Eliot had been the linchpin of that happiness. Everything else, all that had come after when they’d returned to this time, didn’t matter. Not anymore. 

“Q.” Julia’s voice was soft and sympathetic, and she wrapped him in a hug before he’d even looked up, tucking her head close to his. Magic thrummed under her skin, gentle and reassuring, and Quentin thought that he could hold on to his best friend forever. “We’re going to save him, okay? Eliot will be okay. We all will.”

“God, I hope so,” Quentin said, holding her tight. “I miss him, Jules, like I’ve never missed anyone. I--” His voice cracked. “I miss my son. I thought, for a moment, with Poppy--”

“It’s better that you aren’t Poppy’s baby-daddy,” Julia said sternly, pulling away. “And that you aren’t having a dragon spawn. I mean, Falkor? Honestly, Quentin, why go with freaking Falkor when you could have gone full Balerion the Black Dread?”

Quentin laughed. “Balerion can’t talk, obviously. I did consider Lockheed.”

Julia rolled her eyes. “Of course you did, nerd. Also, I think you’ve missed something important with the Monster.”

“What’s that?”

“It snuggled with you, Quentin. It’s getting more and more human, the longer it’s in Eliot’s body.” Julia shrugged. “The more human it is, the less likely it is to eviscerate us all.”

“So you’re saying it might be a good thing, that it’s feeling Eliot’s impulses.” It made a certain amount of sense. The Monster hadn’t killed him when he yelled at it, after all. 

“I can’t imagine the hell you’re going through,” Julia said, which Quentin knew was a bald-faced lie. He knew the form Reynard had taken had been significant to Julia, but he also knew better than to bring it up. “But if we’re going to bring back Eliot, we have to survive the Monster.”

Quentin nodded; it was what he’d been doing, ever since the Monster had approached Bryan on the street. “Encouraging the Monster to experience human emotions as a distraction from killing us isn’t the craziest plan we’ve ever had.”

“Emotions are the worst,” Julia agreed. 

“Damn right they are,” Quentin said. 

The bedroom door swung silently open then, and there was the Monster wearing Eliot’s skin. It stared at them both, and Quentin -- Quentin almost thought it looked _confused_.

“Tea?” Julia asked, voice falsely chipper. 

The Monster nodded slowly, staring at Quentin as Julia grabbed the kettle. “Why does this meat suit crave your company?”

“Caring for others is a powerful thing,” Quentin said carefully. “Maybe it’s because we’re such good friends?”

The Monster nodded. “Friends. The television program says they will be there for you. Are you there for me, Quentin?”

Quentin met Julia’s eyes as she gave a tiny nod, then promised, “Always.”

**Author's Note:**

> come say hi on [tumblr.](http://nokomiss.tumblr.com/)


End file.
